LEED building savings easily outweigh costs

Saturday

Apr 30, 2011 at 2:00 AM

A recent article published on www.seacoastonline.com and in The York Weekly on April 24 that discusses the cost of the proposed York police station has a headline that contradicts both the article and the experience of building professionals. The misleading headline declares: "LEED design increases station costs."

April 28 — To the Editor:

A recent article published on www.seacoastonline.com and in The York Weekly on April 24 that discusses the cost of the proposed York police station has a headline that contradicts both the article and the experience of building professionals. The misleading headline declares: "LEED design increases station costs."

I work at a green building consulting firm, Fore Solutions, in Portland. In our eight years of experience as green building consultants, we have found that new construction receiving LEED Silver certification, when designed and managed properly, costs no more in hard costs than comparable new buildings that have not been built to LEED standards. There are additional soft costs for LEED certification that are minimal and include the LEED consultant's fee, other design consultants' fees and the U.S. Green Building Council's fee to process the paperwork.

For a building similar to the proposed York police station, LEED consulting fees would be approximately 0.5 percent of the construction cost and the USGBC's registration and certification fees, barely worth mentioning, would be around $3,400. These soft costs would be 0.1 percent of the total cost of construction, $6.8 million, of the police station. The statement in the article, "the cost for building construction alone to LEED Silver standards is $4.2 million," makes no sense and should be clarified.

Furthermore, the energy savings achieved by building to LEED Silver standards that are mentioned in the article — $0.93 per square foot less than average energy costs — will save the town of York $25,000 in energy costs each year. In less than two years, the town should make back what was spent on the soft costs of LEED Silver certification. On average, we find a five-year payback on the costs of LEED Silver certification.

If you don't want to take my word for it, consider the highly respected 2003 study by Greg Kats, "The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Building," which shows only a small 2 percent increase in construction costs for green building overall. In his analysis of 33 LEED registered buildings, Kats also found a financial savings over the life of the building of over 10 times the initial investment. A later study by Kats, in which he reviewed the costs of building green schools in Massachusetts, came to similar conclusions.

A better title for the article on the cost of the proposed York police station would have been, "LEED design barely increases the costs of construction while greatly reducing energy costs."

Amy Seif Hattan

Kittery, Maine

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